


Weaning

by atria



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 03:25:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16359824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atria/pseuds/atria
Summary: Kunimitsu apples are apparently a thing. This is hilarious because Tezuka's name means, like, 'glory of the country', but is also a type of fruit.A ficlet about the kind of woman who might come up with a name like this for her child, and what she might teach him about love.





	Weaning

The Kunimitsu is a kind of apple. 

“It was the only name we could all agree on,” his mother said as she packed his lunchbox to the hilt. At nine-and-a-half, he understood. Life with the Tezukas is quarrelsome. On weekend nights, his father and grandfather are fond of gnawing at watermelon seeds after a meal, honing their teeth and political observation on each other. His mother joins the men, but rarely argues a point. She makes them all laugh. 

“I hoped you’d turn out with a sense of humour. Anyway, Kunimitsus are my favourite.” 

The last slices of apple weren’t fitting, and she shrugged and popped one into his mouth and one into hers. He bit. It was sour-sweet.  

“Bring me less next time.” He didn’t mention the older boys who followed him around in elementary school, storming into class 2-1 at the bell in search of Snow White, or more precisely, his lunchbox. It was a rite of passage. He was dealing.

“No, I’ll just get a bigger box.” She pinched his belly, which was all skin, and he frowned and shook his hair into his face. 

“Ne, Kunimitsu, don’t let your guard down,” she teased. Her voice went low in imitation of his grandfather’s, but it was really beyond her natural range and she creaked. He laughed harder.

He learned from other boys in school that you weren’t really supposed to like your mother. Obey her, sure, if you were a good child, maybe put up with her nagging in exchange for a Gameboy and school lunches you could brag about, but Kunimitsu already felt his distance from the other children, especially the boys. Sometimes he resented it and sometimes he was proudly protective of his difference; didn’t matter what he did, it never changed.

It was kaa-san’s idea for him to play a sport. 

“The Matterhorn is very big and impressive, but he needs friends. Rivals. Whatever kids with siblings have,” she told his father. She was big on fitting in. He agreed, as was his wont. They gave Kunimitsu a choice, and with his mind on the Mario Tennis Aces game he got for his birthday, he said tennis. 

The next day Kunimitsu was signed up for a junior club, five prescribed hours of getting along with his peers every week. His mother was pleased. Kunimitsu fell in love.

*

Kunimitsu’s mother is Chinese. Growing up, the fact seemed about as relevant to life as kabuki or calligraphy: the sort of culture you rustle up on the big celebration days, but otherwise are free to pick and choose from as you please. Mother didn’t please. She was always big on fitting in. 

She went head-to-head with his grandfather about getting him a Gameboy, teaching him team (or, well, slightly less solitary) sports, borrowing detective and fantasy novels from the library instead of just the classics. 

She was the first to read him Harry Potter. Her accent, mostly smooth over the years, fumbled the Japanese pronunciations of English words, and Kunimitsu knew a knickerbocker glory by the richness of their laughing when she tried to curl her tongue around the long consonants and the English ‘r’. 

Years later, when he was twenty-one and alone in London, he would grow bored enough of his loneliness to sit down in the first cafe he saw and order a knickerbocker glory off the menu. By then, his English was fine, but the server looked askance at the order for one. He was disappointed when it tasted flatly, sickly sweet. 

It was the sort of thing he would’ve told his mother first. But Kunimitsu’s teenage rebellion came later and more devastating than most, at an age when it was nearly irrevocable. Everything Kunimitsu did he did to the fullest extent.

“It’s not wrong,” he told her at eighteen, trying to be sure himself. Once, he would have looked to her for confidence.

“Normal boys don’t do that,” she said. She made a vague upset gesture with her hands, and they both blushed and flinched.

Kunimitsu’s heart sank. There wasn’t much to say after that. “I won’t tell your father,” she said, as though it were an indulgence. She said she knew all children grew rebellious, that he had never been selfish, that he couldn’t see it now but there would be come a time when he would think differently. 

For his part, he didn’t bring That Echizen Boy over to the house anymore, and when Ryoma blocked his phone number before his nineteenth birthday, he didn’t see fit to tell her, and it was as though nothing had happened except that Kunimitsu and his mother weren’t talking anymore, each righteous in their own silence, and no one in the family knew the reason except him and her.

*

“I’m going to L.A. once I get the diploma,” Ryoma said, his head in Kunimitsu’s lap on his plush American bed. Kunimitsu’s thighs were bare. Karupin had been exiled from the room before their activities, and was likely downstairs tormenting or being tormented by Nanjiroh.

“Good.” Kunimitsu meant it. 

Ryoma opened an eye at him. He nuzzled the crook of his knee with his nose, and Kunimitsu thrummed. “And you?”

“I have a place at Tokyo to study law.”

He hadn’t decided, or at least hadn’t gotten ready to say aloud what he himself knew, but telling Ryoma this much was close enough, and Ryoma knew. Kunimitsu knew that Ryoma knew in the way he jerked his head up and glared, fully awake. The way his knuckles grazed Kunimitsu’s chest, too light for a punch, but the jar of bone on bone still hurt, and they both winced.

"Echizen," Kunimitsu said, wishing for a better word.

“Fuck you,” Ryoma said, English. The intent translated, as did the fact that he was trying the word for the first time. It was the sort of thing that touched Kunimitsu about Ryoma usually. That he was calm and intent beyond his years but still trying things on for size. 

As it was, Kunimitsu felt as Ryoma’s opponents must have felt when faced with that flat stare, the absence of an expression that said you were an object and he preferred his cat to you. He might as well have been on the other side of a net with an umpire and a jeering crowd pitting one of them against the other.

They were close now than either of them have been to anyone in their lives, Kunimitsu suspected, but still they didn’t have the words. Kunimitsu couldn’t explain that he felt more intimate with Ryoma now than he ever did on a tennis court. That he still wanted to win, but wanted to win at something where the prize was a world of things he couldn’t have conceived with his own mind. That two years in high school without Ryoma or the old promises made tennis instrumental and empty; when he confessed to Ryoma as nearly as he could, he came to understand his tennis as a sort of passion, and that passion went. 

But Kunimitsu didn’t have the words, and Ryoma took Karupin and riled his father up to ensure that he wouldn’t hear, anyway. Instead, Kunimitsu went home to his mother in the living room with red wine in a sake cup and a novel: romance by the cover and Chinese, not Kanji, on closer examination. She drinks this way to keep herself in check but, Kunimitsu thinks viciously, she mostly fails, doesn’t she?

“Kunimitsu,” she said. 

He wanted to go to his room, but in a strange way, wanted even more for his hurt to be seen. He stopped in the hall where he was in shadow, and staying or going was his prerogative.

“Kunimitsu, did you feel different from the other kids?” And when he didn’t say a word, “Did you feel like you could be like one of them?” 

“Is that why?” she breathed, and neither of them could deny the question she was asking.

He stomped to his room and slammed the door before he said anything unforgivable. “Kunimitsu,” she called one more time through the door, and then she stopped and was silent. He flicked the light switch and flicked it back off again. He braced his elbows on his knees and pressed his fists to his eyes as though he could push them back into his skull, and thought, ridiculously, we hadn’t even given each other our names. 

*

Twenty-one is good for Kunimitsu.

“You’re nice now,” Kikumaru declared when he visited before Kunimitsu moved out of his tiny campus apartment a month ago. “It’s weird on you, buchou, but I like it.”

He didn’t question or challenge the assessment, frown or pretend not to hear. It was true. He’s better at paying attention to the people he chooses these days. It’s probably a side-effect of living with Oishi for three years and learning, in the meantime, that he can’t be the best at everything. Not if he wants to do anything worth doing. And he’s grown up and let loose enough to understand that coming to London for a study exchange in Wimbledon season is the closest he can come at once to what he wanted so bitterly at eighteen and what he wants now. He doesn’t expect, just desires. This one is all him.

London is both harder and easier than Munich was. A voice that sounds strangely like his mother’s says it is because he has acquired the emotional literacy to articulate that he misses his family and friends in particular and Japanese food in general, but it’s fine and it will end, and it doesn’t help to pretend that he doesn’t in the meantime.

He hasn’t needed his mother to speak for him for a while, but he does miss her sometimes.

When he leaves the cafe with most of the knickerbocker still dripping into its glass, he goes straight to the Wimbledon where he takes the elevator to the nosebleed section. For the final, even this ticket will take most of his spending money for the month. He did the numbers and decided he didn’t mind.

In an effort to include the commoners in the atmosphere, the intercom is loud enough to rattle teeth. But it’s worth it when the names of the players come and one of them is not just familiar, but known. Kunimitsu shuts his eyes for just a second against the immensity of it before he peels them open and tenses in his seat. He’s fourteen again, stunned by the trust he places in this mostly-stranger’s game. It’s giving. It’s gaining. The next hours of his life rest on this and he worries as jealously as a mother, dreads and dreams as he only ever did for himself before, as he never has since.

He wants to whack his fourteen-year-old self and Ryoma both, for thinking this was all about tennis.

*

When he goes back to the dorm two days later, Ryoma is reading the newspaper in the lobby. The headline on the front reads FED DEFAULTS AGAINST ECHIZEN. 

Kunimitsu takes a breath and walks in.

“Buchou. Kikumaru-senpai said you were in town.”

Kunimitsu frowns. So that’s why Kikumaru asked for his address to send a postcard that has yet to arrive. Oishi’s knack for meddling, it seems, has rubbed off.

“I’m here for law school.”

“I know.”

Kunimitsu thinks for a while. There was a long time in his life when he thought that he’d given this up, and that it’d be a good thing. He loved Ryoma before he was ready to love anyone, and it was the same for Ryoma, too. That hearing Ryoma's name in the mouth of reporters and strangers had made Kunimitsu’s belly lurch with want, it hardly signified. It's unfortunate and unruly, childish and transgressive. It's abnormal. 

In his time alone his imagination has gotten to run loose. It’s hard not to, with Ryoma’s name all over this town, Ryoma, Ryoma, Ryoma, Ryoma with his lips on a Coke bottle over Oxford Street, scowl fetching in a teenage sort of way but reminding Kunimitsu only of a younger mouth, sulky with sugar and stuttering against his own. His heart stuttered too. He thinks about taking Ryoma upstairs and forcing tea and a square meal into him the way he has longed to since Ryoma was a teenager and sharp with bones, long before Kunimitsu’s domestic skills rose to the challenge of following through. He thinks of Ryoma with a stalk of string bean in his mouth, lascivious, snarking, “Buchou, are you on a diet?” 

He thinks of giving Ryoma his name. He thinks of explaining his mother, and what she taught him about love. He thinks of the first touch of a tongue on his, that particular sour-sweetness of a teenage mouth unprepared for a kiss. How his mother preferred an apple barely in season, and so he learned to, too. Despite everything.

“Mother named me after the fruit,” he thinks of saying with his sternest expression. He wants to bait Ryoma for a laugh, become good at it, the world champion of making Ryoma laugh, as he hasn’t truly wanted to be the best at anything, not in a long, long time. 

He thinks about the risk he took at seventeen.  

“Why don’t you come up,” he says, and the shape made by Ryoma’s mouth is nothing like in the photographs. 


End file.
